In the Israel-Hamas war, history and propaganda repeat themselves

Evening prayers had ended and the sermon had just begun in the al-Maqadmah mosque on the northern outskirts of Jabalia refugee camp when an explosion ripped the wooden doors off their hinges, slamming them across the room against the far wall. At least 15 people were killed. One of them was a boy who had been sitting at the entrance. Rescuers searching in the winter dark found his disembodied leg on the roof of the mosque.

Israel rejected claims that one of its missiles had caused the devastation, saying “the supposed uninvolved civilians who were the casualties of the attack were in fact Hamas operatives killed while fighting against the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces]”.

Though it may sound eerily familiar, that was not this winter in Gaza. It was another winter there 15 years ago when, with Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against Hamas. By the time it ended in January 2009, after three weeks, 13 Israelis were dead, including four victims of what is horribly called “friendly fire”. Between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians had died.

A UN human rights fact-finding mission investigating the conflict said it had established that Israel had fired a missile in the vicinity of the al-Maqadmah mosque that night and that shrapnel retrieved from the walls was consistent with such a missile. It found no evidence that the mosque was being used to shelter combatants, store weapons or fire rockets.

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Known as the Goldstone Report, it was political dynamite even before it was written. Israel refused to co-operate with the mission from the outset. Ultimately, it concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed potential war crimes.

Despite a clamour of demands that the Goldstone Report be redacted following its chairman’s terse and carefully worded Washington Post piece, it remains fully on the record

The report got its name from its chairman, Richard Goldstone, a former judge in South Africa who was the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunals for both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. When the report was published, he was vilified as a “self-hating Jew” by supporters of Israel and “a Jewish anti-Semite” by the country’s then finance minister, Yuval Steinitz. Some international Jewish communities boycotted him and, in Johannesburg, a picket on the synagogue was threatened by protesters if he were to attend his 13-year-old grandson’s bar mitzvah.

Eighteen months after the report was published, Goldstone wrote a short, personal opinion piece for the Washington Post. He said that, had what was known by then been known during the mission’s work, its report would have been different. Contrary to its conclusion that Israel had targeted civilians in several specific incidents it investigated, he stated, in retrospect, that they were “not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”. In response, the three other members of the mission – including Desmond Travers, a former Irish Army colonel and UN peacekeeper – wrote in the Guardian newspaper that they wanted “to dispel any impression that subsequent developments have rendered any part of the mission’s report unsubstantiated, erroneous or inaccurate”.

Despite a clamour of demands that the Goldstone Report be redacted following its chairman’s terse and carefully worded Washington Post piece, it remains fully on the record and can be read, in six different languages, on the UN Human Rights Council’s website. What is says sounds so freshly familiar that it might have been written today about what has been happening in Gaza this winter.

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On claims made by Israel in the winter of 2008/2009 that Gazan civilians were being used as human shields, it has this to say: “The mission found no evidence, however, to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or that they forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.”

To the contrary, the report states that Israeli soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed Gazan men and forced them to enter houses they were searching ahead of them. “Published testimonies of Israeli soldiers who took part in the military operations confirm the continuation of this practice [in breach of] orders from Israel’s High Court to the armed forces to put an end to it and repeated public assurances from the armed forces that the practice had been discontinued,” the report states.

Attacks on Gaza’s legislative council building and its main prison had been justified by the Israeli government on the grounds that they were part of the “Hamas terrorist infrastructure”, making them legitimate targets. The report disagrees, finding no evidence that the buildings “made an effective contribution to military action” and that the attacks on them “constituted deliberate attacks on civilian objects in violation of the rule of customary international humanitarian law”.

Why do the US, the UK and the EU still rush to accept Israel’s version of events as gospel? Reading this report evokes an old truism. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

On an Israeli attack on al-Quds hospital and its adjacent ambulance depot which necessitated evacuation of the sick and wounded, the report “rejects the allegation that fire was directed at the Israeli armed forces from within the hospital”.

[ 'Israelis and Palestinians have one thing in common: the sense of living beside people who want to kill you' ]

How chillingly familiar these tropes and justifications sound today. Since Hamas’s butchering rampage in Israel on October 7th left 1,200 people dead and more than 200 others abducted, Israel’s retaliation campaign has killed more than 14,100 Gazans and flattened more than half of the buildings in the northern part of the territorial strip. Israel continues to claim that citizens in Gaza are being used as human shields and that Hamas is operating under the shelter of public service buildings, such as hospitals.

These justifications may yet prove to be true. Hamas is certainly capable of such brutality. The Goldstone Report makes numerous findings of human rights and humanitarian crimes committed by Hamas that winter 15 years ago.

[ In Gaza, one commodity is not in short supply: self-delusion ]

To recite the Goldstone Report is not to suggest that Israel is all wrong and Hamas is all right. The point is the sense of deja vu it conveys. Like history, propaganda repeats itself.

What is most baffling about the report is not its chief author’s apparent dismissal of some of its findings or the political furore it provoked. It is simply this: why do the US, the UK and the EU still rush to accept Israel’s version of events as gospel? Reading this report evokes an old truism. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.